Would he ask me a question like that if I weren’t a blond? Such thoughts were never far from Rollant’s mind. He looked up at Joram and nodded. “Sometimes, Sergeant. Otherwise, we would’ve licked ’em already, don’t you suppose? And sometimes we’re better than they are.” But not often enough, gods damn it.
He waited for Joram to burst like a flung firepot and spill flames everywhere. But the sergeant only grunted and kept walking. Smitty whistled. “You got away with it,” he said. “And I know why.”
“It’s not because Joram loves blonds any too well,” Rollant said.
“No, of course not,” Smitty agreed, as if the idea that anyone-anyone Detinan, that is-could love blonds too well was too ridiculous to contemplate… and so it probably was. The farmer’s son went on, “You got away with it on account of you’re a corporal now. If an ordinary soldier-me, for instance-said something like that, old Joram’d run over him like a herd of unicorns.”
On account of you’re a corporal now. All his life, Rollant had been on the outside looking in as far as status was concerned. Being born blond would do that in the Kingdom of Detina. Joining King Avram’s army hadn’t improved things much. A blond who was also a common soldier was at the bottom of two different hierarchies.
But now he was off the bottom of one of them. He had stripes on his sleeve. He was the only blond in the whole regiment who did. Had Joram given him the same courtesy he would have given a Detinan corporal, a corporal whose skin was respectably swarthy, whose hair was respectably black?
“By the gods, maybe he did,” Rollant said softly.
“No maybes about it,” Smitty declared. “You’re a corporal, so you’ve got it easy. You get to tell people to cut firewood and fill canteens. You don’t have to do it yourself. And you don’t get the heat people like me do. You’d have to really make a botch of things to get chewed out.”
“Maybe,” Rollant said. But he wasn’t entirely convinced. If he made a mistake, he suspected-no, he was as sure as made no difference-he would lose his rank and become a common soldier again faster than a Detinan committing the same blunder.
“Standard-bearer!” Lieutenant Griff called. “Get the flag! We’re going to move out in a few minutes.”
“Coming, sir!” Rollant scrambled to his feet, poured the last of the tea down his throat, and hurried over to the company’s banner. He saluted it and put a pinch of earth at the base of the staff as he picked it up. It wasn’t quite an object of veneration in its own right, but it wasn’t far removed from being one. Who could tell for certain, after all, what was divine and what wasn’t?
Having gone through the ritual, he took hold of the flag. Carrying it made him feel stronger and braver than he really was. Of course, carrying it also made him a target. Were that not true, he wouldn’t have gained the job. Since that’s the way things work, I’d better be as strong and brave as I can.
Colonel Nahath’s regiment-and several others-started moving north a few minutes later. The traitors had fled back of Goober Creek, a miserable little stream about halfway between the Hoocheecoochee River and Marthasville itself. Joseph the Gamecock’s men also had unicorn-riders and raiders afoot still loose in the region between the Hoocheecoochee and Goober Creek. They would snipe at General Hesmucet’s men whenever they got a chance. The southrons’ column advanced with scouts on both wings.
Rollant knew that was so, but couldn’t have proved it himself. He couldn’t see the front of the column or the rear, and he couldn’t see very far off to the sides. That was partly because Nahath’s regiment was in the middle of the long file of men in gray and partly because of the choking clouds of red dust the men in front of him had already kicked up. The dust got in his eyes. It got in his nose and made him sneeze. It got in his mouth, leaving his teeth and tongue coated in grit. It turned his tunic and pantaloons a color halfway between rust and blood. It turned his skin the same shade, except where rills of sweat ran through and showed what color he was supposed to be.
Lieutenant Griff looked as much like a man made of red dust as did Rollant. When he spat, his spittle was brick-red. He was sweating even harder than Rollant, but was pretty red under the sweat, too. “Lion God’s tail tuft, it’s hot,” he said. “How does anybody stand this horrible weather year after year?”
“Sir, when I first came down to New Eborac from Palmetto Province, I thought I’d freeze to death every winter,” Rollant answered. “It’s all what you’re used to, I expect.” He’d done harder work than marching in hotter, stickier weather than this; Karlsburg took a back seat to nobody for dreadful summers.
“Gods-damned bugs.” Griff slapped at himself, but did nothing except raise a puff of dust from his tunic. “This is a horrible place.”
“Looks like pretty good farming country to me, sir, you don’t mind my saying so.” Rollant had had to learn how to contradict Detinans. As a serf in Palmetto Province, he never would have dared do any such thing. As a carpenter in New Eborac City, he had to. If he didn’t, everyone would have cheated him unmercifully.
Even in the army, a good many Detinans didn’t want to hear a blond telling them they were wrong. Griff took it pretty well. He said, “You’d have to have a leather hide and iron muscles to do a proper job of working it.”
“Maybe.” Rollant hid a grimace. His blond ancestors hadn’t known about iron; they’d used the softer bronze instead. Detinan swords and armor and iron-headed quarrels, along with Detinan unicorns and Detinan magecraft, had cast down the blond kingdoms of the north. Even now, some blonds had a superstitious reverence for iron. Rollant didn’t, not in the top part of his mind, but he still knew what the strong metal had done to his folk.
Just then, lightning smote from a clear blue sky, striking the head of the column. Distant screams came back to Rollant’s ears. Lieutenant Griff cursed. “They’re playing the Thunderer’s game,” he growled. “And where were our mages? Asleep, or else with their thumbs up their arses.”
Northern wizards still had the edge on their southron counterparts, although King Avram’s sorcerers were at last gaining. The northerners had always had a need for man-killing magic: they had to hold their serfs in subjection. Southron mages helped manufactories make more. That didn’t prepare them to meet lightnings.
Another crash of thunder, as if the Detinan god were indeed pounding mortals here below. More screams rose from the southrons, these louder and closer. If the traitors strike us again, Rollant thought nervously, the next bolt would hit right about… here. He looked up toward the heavens, but saw only sun and sky. Mages made lightning from nothing.
Just putting one foot in front of the other and marching on wasn’t easy. Rollant made himself do it, and made himself hold the standard extra high. “Well done, Corporal!” Lieutenant Griff called. “They can’t make us afraid if we don’t let them.”
Rollant was afraid. If Griff wasn’t, Rollant thought something had to be wrong with him. I’m not showing it, he thought. Maybe he’s just not showing it, either. Men lived behind masks. No one wanted to admit he was a coward, even to himself. And so soldiers who would sooner have run away went into battle without a murmur.
When the next lightning bolt crashed down, Rollant did flinch. He couldn’t help himself. He noticed Lieutenant Griff drawing into himself, too, which helped make him feel better. This bolt didn’t land in the roadway and on the southron soldiers; it came down wide to the right, and raised a great cloud of dust and fountain of earth in a roadside field.
“Well, well,” Griff said with a certain sardonic glee. “The mages on our side really aren’t all asleep. Who would have thought it?”
More thunderbolts smote the advancing column. Almost all of them, after the first pair, missed. But one or two more did strike home. The southrons who weren’t killed outright cried their misery to the uncaring sky. Healers ran over to them to do what they could. The trouble, as Rollant knew only too well, was that healers couldn’t do very much. A wounded man was only a little more likely to
die without treatment as he was after the healers got their hands on him.
Rollant wished he hadn’t thought of that. He wished he hadn’t had to think of that. Then he marched past some of the men one of those first two levinbolts had struck. The smell of charred meat was thick in the air. Had that been meat of a different sort, his mouth might have watered. As things were, his stomach heaved. He had to fight a lonely battle to keep from puking.
Not all the men the sorcerous lightning had struck were dead. A healer gave a dreadfully burned fellow laudanum. Killing pain healers could do, even if they also often killed patients.
Not far ahead lay Marthasville. Rollant couldn’t see it now, not with all the dust in the air, but he had seen it, and it remained distinct in his mind’s eye even if invisible to those of his body. He knew what it meant: a real victory over the traitors, a burning brand tossed onto the funeral pyre of their hopes. Let us into Marthasville, he thought, and how can the north call itself a kingdom?
But the southrons weren’t there yet. They’d crossed the Hoocheecoochee, the last great natural barrier before the city. Still, Joseph the Gamecock’s army remained in front of them and, as Rollant had seen, remained full of fight. Nothing in this war had come easy up till now. Rollant didn’t suppose anything would be easy from here on out, either.
* * *
Lieutenant General George said, “Well, sir, things may be starting to run our way at last.” He spoke with some bemusement; there had been more than a few times when he’d wondered if he would ever be able to say such a thing.
Hesmucet nodded. “The lovely thing about finally being over the Hoocheecoochee is that we don’t even have to attack Marthasville to make King Geoffrey pitch a fit.”
“I hadn’t thought about that when we set out on this campaign, but it’s true,” Doubting George admitted.
“Well, nobody could see just how things would go when we set out,” Hesmucet said generously. “But here we are, and we can cause the northerners almost as much trouble by cutting off their glideway traffic toward the east as we can by taking Marthasville away from them. And if they shift men to try to stop us, how can they keep on covering the city?”
“To the hells with me if I know.” Doubting George clapped his hands. “Congratulations, sir. You’ve wrapped up the whole campaign and tied a fancy ribbon around it.”
Hesmucet laughed. “Wouldn’t it be fine if things were as easy in the field as they are when we talk about them? I could wish that were so, but I know well enough that it isn’t.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” George said, and meant every word. “Generals who build castles in the air commonly have them knocked down around their ears. That’s what happened to Guildenstern by the River of Death: he was so sure the northerners were running away from us, he didn’t take the precautions he should have on the off chance he was wrong.”
“I don’t envy his fate,” Hesmucet said.
“Who would?” George replied. “Going out to the steppes to fight the blond savages is hard duty any time, but it’s ten times as hard when we’ve got ourselves a real war here.”
When the real war here was over, a lot of men with brevet ranks of brigadier and even lieutenant general would go back to being captains. They’d go back to chasing flea-bitten blond savages, too. Most of the time, that was what the Detinan army did. George’s own permanent rank was brigadier. He wouldn’t have to spend endless years trotting across the steppe on unicornback. He’d done plenty of that before this war. He wouldn’t be sorry not to do it again, though sitting behind a desk in Georgetown and drafting reports no one would ever read also struck him as imperfectly attractive.
Hesmucet’s thoughts had gone along a different glideway. “If you ask me,” he said, “we’re going to have to kill off all the blond nomads on the steppe. We’re stronger than they are, we can’t do anything useful with them, and they’re too stupid and too stubborn to know when they’re beaten. Once we empty the steppe of them, we can fill the land with good Detinan farmers who’ll do something useful with it.”
With a smile, Doubting George said, “You’re solving all the kingdom’s problems this morning, aren’t you, sir?”
“Gods damn it, that’s what a commanding general is for,” Hesmucet declared. To George’s relief, he was also smiling. A commanding general who took such boasts seriously was a disaster waiting to happen, as the unhappy Guildenstern could attest. Hesmucet went on, “I’ll want you to move your wing north and east, Lieutenant General, to put it in position to harry the glideway lines leading east.”
“Yes, sir,” George said. “Shall I set them in motion right away, or do I have some time to prepare first?”
“You have a few days,” Hesmucet replied. “I’m still getting all my ducks in a row now that everybody’s on this side of the Hoocheecoochee. I don’t want anything to go wrong on account of my carelessness.”
General Guildenstern would never have said anything like that. “If you worry about it, sir, it’s not likely to happen,” Doubting George said. “Tell me when you need me to be ready to move, and I will be.”
“I know,” Hesmucet said. “I can rely on you.” He nodded, touched a forefinger to the front brim of his gray felt hat in what wasn’t quite a salute, and walked away.
Doubting George stared after him. It wasn’t that the commanding general was wrong: George knew he would try to do exactly what Hesmucet required of him. But, in a lot of armies on both sides in this war, that would have been a very strange thing. Plenty of wing commanders were at their superiors’ throats, wanting to lead armies themselves. Some of them went so far as to disobey and undercut army commanders, regardless of what that did to campaigns.
Fighting Joseph would undercut Hesmucet in a heartbeat, George thought. In half a heartbeat. So why not me? The answer to that was obvious: because we’re winning by doing what we’re doing with Hesmucet in command. Fighting Joseph wouldn’t care about that. I do.
He called Colonel Andy and said, “We’re going to be moving north and east before long, to cut the glideway links with the eastern part of what Geoffrey calls his kingdom. Draft the necessary orders for the move for my approval.”
“Yes, sir,” his adjutant said. “So there’s not going to be any direct attack on Marthasville, then?”
“Not right away, anyhow,” George answered. “General Hesmucet feels we can do the traitors about as much harm by cutting these links as we could by taking the city. I think he’s right; Parthenia draws men and food from the east, and Duke Edward’s army will suffer because those supplies can’t come through.”
“I hope that’s so, sir,” Andy said. “It still seems strange to me, though, to have come all this way to Marthasville and then not to try to take the place.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that we will try to take it,” Doubting George said. “But we can do this more easily-and, once we’ve done it, Joseph the Gamecock will have to respond in one way or another. Maybe we’ll be able to meet his army outside of its entrenchments. That would give us a better chance of licking it once for all.”
“Yes, sir,” his adjutant said again. “What shall I make the effective date of these orders? When will we be moving out?”
“I don’t know precisely, because General Hesmucet didn’t know precisely,” George replied. “Do you think we can be ready to move in three days’ time?”
“I certainly do, sir,” Colonel Andy said.
“All right, then-make that the effective date,” George said. “I’m pretty sure we won’t have to move sooner, and if we aren’t ordered out till later, we can just delay day by day, as necessary.”
“Yes, sir,” Andy repeated. “That makes good sense.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” George told him. “I’ll try not to let it happen again.”
Colonel Andy opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. He walked off without saying anything. George smiled at his retreating back. He knew his occasional fits of whimsy not only perplexed but also a
larmed his adjutant. As befitted an aide, Andy was nothing if not serious. George was serious when he had to be and when he felt like it. There were times when he didn’t-and, being a general, he could get away with indulging himself now and again.
Raiders from the northern forces still operated on this side of Goober Creek. Snipers with powerful crossbows-not the quick-cocking kind most footsoldiers carried, but bigger, heavier weapons that used either a crank or a foot pedal to draw the bow, and that shot correspondingly farther than an ordinary crossbow-took a steady toll on his men. And Brigadier Spinner’s unicorn-riders did their best to disrupt the flow of supplies from Rising Rock up to General Hesmucet’s army.
They didn’t have an easy time of it. Hesmucet had assembled what was without a doubt the best set of military artificers Doubting George had ever seen. When Joseph the Gamecock retreated over the Hoocheecoochee River, he’d naturally knocked down all the bridges spanning the stream, including the one that had carried glideway carpets. Counting its approaches, that one was three hundred yards long, and thirty yards high at its highest point over the Hoocheecoochee. Hesmucet’s artificers-with some help from Colonel Phineas’ sorcerers-had taken four and a half days to re-create the span… and all the timber they used was live trees when they started the job.
Against men of such talents, even the most diligent destroyers had their work cut out for them. And the southrons kept Brigadier Spinner’s unicorn-riders too busy to let them attack the glideway line up to Rising Rock as diligently as they would have liked. Ned of the Forest might have done better; Doubting George, like every other southron general, had developed a fearful respect for the untutored, almost unlettered northern commander of unicorn-riders. But Ned was off by the Great River, and he was too busy to turn his ferocious attention to that lonely glideway line snaking up from the south.
Contemplating that, George said, “Do you know, Colonel, I’m vain enough to think I can stand up against anybody as a tactician.”
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